Willing Executioners?

[jbor at bigpond.com]

Some links of relevance to the thread, and a thought. First, an article  
about _The Book Thief_, a new novel by Markus Zusak:

[...] Although it was a difficult time to be growing up in Germany,  
Zusak knew from his family's stories that moments of humanity shone  
through.

"I mean, my dad was in the Hitler Youth and he just eventually stopped  
going. He just thought, 'I can't stand this.' You don't ever hear about  
that," he says.

Part of _The Book Thief_'s message is about the power of words and  
propaganda. Of course, the Nazis weren't the only ones turning out the  
political spin.

"We have been fooled just as much. We have these images of the  
straight-marching lines of boys and the 'Heil Hitlers' and this idea  
that everyone in Germany was in it together," he says. "But there still  
were rebellious children and people who didn't follow the rules and  
people who hid Jews and other people in their attics. So there's  
another side of Nazi Germany." [...]

http://www.smh.com.au/news/books/hope-amid-the-flames/2005/09/22/ 
1126982166740.html

Second, Linda Grant's _Guardian_ review of _A Woman in Berlin_, an  
abridged version of which also appeared in the paper here today:

http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/history/0,6121,1519031,00.html

And, what of Pynchon's depictions of "ordinary" Germans and human  
psychology in _GR_ w/r/t Goldhagen's "cognitive model" theory?

best

> [...] Leaving aside the numerous challenges scholars have issued to  
> specific portions of Goldhagen's interpretation, I find that Hitler's  
> Willing Executioners suffers from two pervasive, fundamental flaws.  
> First, the author repeatedly (sometimes arrogantly) "assumes" what he  
> should be trying to prove. This is exemplified by Goldhagen's  
> assertions that it is up to his critics to prove that most Germans  
> were not anti-Semitic. "Virtually no evidence exists," he writes, "to  
> contradict the notion that the intense and ubiquitous public  
> declaration of antisemitism [in Nazi propaganda] was mirrored in  
> people's private beliefs" (p. 30). Assuming that most Germans were  
> strongly anti-Semitic even before Hitler came to power, Goldhagen  
> insists that, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, he is  
> entitled to conclude that they remained anti-Semitic. "The absence of  
> evidence that change occurred in Germany's cognitive model about Jews  
> should be seen to suggest strongly that these models and the elaborate  
> beliefs dependent upon them were reproduced and continued to exist"  
> (p. 46), he asserts illogically and without supporting evidence. [...]

> http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=11563863791127